The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming

Description

What is at the heart of political resistance? Whilst traditional accounts often conceptualise it as a reaction to power, this volume (prioritising remarks by Michel Foucault) invites us to think of resistance as primary. The author proposes a strategic analysis that highlights how our efforts need to be redirected towards a horizon of creation and change. Checchi first establishes a genealogy of two main trajectories of the history of our present: the liberal subject of rights and the neoliberal ideas of human capital and bio-financialisation. The former emerges as a reactive closure of Etienne de la Boètie’s discourse on human nature and natural companionship. The other forecloses the creative potential of Autonomist Marxist conceptions of labour, first elaborated by Mario Tronti. The focus of this text then shifts towards contemporary openings. Initially, Checchi proposes an inverted reading of Jacques Rancière’s concept of politics as interruption that resonates with Antonio Negri’s emphasis on Baruch Spinoza’s potential qua resistance. Finally, the author stages a virtual encounter between Gilles Deleuze’s ontology of matter and Foucault’s account of the primacy of resistance with which the text begins. Through this series of explorations, The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming traces a conceptual trajectory with and beyond Foucault by affirming the affinity between resistance and creation. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Resistance against the against Against the traditional understanding of resistance The oppositional tradition The reactive tradition and the primacy of power Rethinking resistance ‘A third kind of affect’ Why the primacy? Overview of chapters 1 ‘Resistance comes first’: Metamorphoses, change, creation Points, forces and relays: A microphysics of resistance From resistance to resistance-and-its-possibility Antagonistic metamorphoses Strategies of resistance The primacy of resistance with and beyond Foucault Resistance, creation and becoming 2 Human nature and resistance. From La Boétie’s companionship to the liberal closure Towards an art of voluntary inservitude The contract’s evil twin: The misfortune of servitude La Boétie’s Leviathan Spotting freedom among denatured beings ‘We are all comrades’ A cooperative state of nature The liberal closure: Securing the necessity of power despite natural freedom Comradeship as self-betrayal Where there is non-resistance, there is power Hobbes’s Leviathan: A body without bodies? The right to resist From the primacy of resistance to the necessity of power Towards the edge, never beyond the edge 3 The primacy of labour: Processes of expansions and scenarios of extinction Arendt’s (unwanted) primacy of labour The modern victory of labour Warning against extinction The trajectory of Italian autonomist Marxism The Copernican inversion of operaismo Working-class becomings Expansion and extinction The cooperativist principle of the sovereignty of labour The sovereignty of labour Neoliberal closures Extending labour to the whole of life: Human capital Biofinancialization Scenarios of extinction 4 Power as interruption and the affirmation of potentia: Politics and resistance between Rancière and Negri Openness and creation The primacy of politics in Rancière From equality to obedience Obedience as accidental misfortune Interruption comes first Political resistance creates worlds A physics of resistance: Potentia and being in Negri’s Spinoza The dangerous process of the construction of being Corrupt imagination creates worlds too The self-organization of the multitude Potentia: Resistance – counter-power – constitution De-stat-ic-ization: The real urgency of the inexistent The primacy of potentia qua resistance Constitutive affirmation and accidental opposition An eternal age of resistance 5 Re-existence: The materialist ontology of resistance and becoming A transversal line How many diagrams? The unified abstract machine Deleuze’s lectures on Foucault Active and reactive singularities Diagrams and mutation A third kind of singularity Resistance as the outside of the outside From history to becoming Resistance, dice-throws and optional rules Material openings A conclusive opening: At last resistance comes first Notes References Index